20 January 2010

I love this webcomic.



It can't be good for the sun.

18 January 2010

Fishes Use Gills for Ion Exchange, Oxygen Secondary!


I stumbled upon (not literally) this Science commentary that says that fish may have evolved their gills initially as agents for ion exchange. The researchers, and I'm not sure how animal friendly this is, put fish into little boxes that separated their back ends from their front ends and measured ion levels and oxygen levels in the separate compartments. Little fishes are able to exchange ions and oxygen through their thin skin, and the idea was that as the fish age, the gills would start to exchange ions and oxygen faster than the back end of the fish. The gills exchanged ions earlier in development than oxygen, so the researchers are saying that this indicates that they were evolved for this function. This is not really a very compelling argument and the researchers are talking about doing future work with gene expression to see which set of machinery is expressed in development first, but still... That doesnt quite make the argument either, because when something appears in development earlier isnt necessarily correlated with earlier evolution.

It is apparently hard to take pictures of baby fishes because there are no good pictures out there. Fish gills were too gross and drawings are boring. Here is another hit I got with baby fishes though :)

15 January 2010

I'm Baaaaaack!!!

Back from Europe, jet lagged, not really so bad though, just have an old person's sleep schedule, early to bed early to rise.

Miss the grocery stores all over the place and every one of them had fresh cheap bread. Nice to not be living out of a bag though. Probably miss Prague the most. There's just a feeling about the city that gets to you, or maybe it was just appealing because it was cheaper. There is an honesty about the city and the people, maybe.

Current thoughts about grad school involve QUITTING. I feel more serious about it this time. We'll see.